Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal | Adult Swim

Yeah this is going to be dope.
 
October can't come over fast enough.
 
Genndy at his most 'Primal': 'Samurai Jack' creator returns with a grisly new show

You’ve never seen something like Primal from Genndy Tartakovsky, the animator behind Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack. And yet his past work were almost stepping stones to this new series.

The first clip released by Cartoon Network’s AdultSwim showed a Tyrannosaurus rex protecting her babies from larger dinosaurs, tearing snouts off of bodies in bloody fashion and watching as a caveman ally uses rocks to bash bones. In the latest look at this alternative prehistoric setting, envisioning humans and dinosaurs coexisting at the same time, a routine hunting mission turns into a fast-paced action sequence as the caveman stalks his next meal, only to lose the boar to the hungry rex.

It’s not something one might expect from the guy who brought us such kid-friendly fair, including the Hotel Transylvania movies. In fact, the concept for Primal began as a children’s show before evolving into a story about this human and dinosaur living together when both lose their families to more vicious beasts.

“Years ago, it started off as a kids 6-11 show about this little caveman and he has a little dinosaur friend and they have adventures together,” Tartakovsky tells EW. “Then, as my tastes started to grow and I felt like I’m not sure where I’m heading with this, it organically started to develop into something more mature.”


You can almost track this development through his work. After Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, Tartakovsky went on to The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, still a kids’ show, but one that dealt with the Grim Reaper. Then came Star Wars: Clone Wars and Sym-Bionic Titan, geared closer to a teen audience. With the comeback of Samurai Jack, which debuted a surprise fifth season after the season 4 finale 12 years prior, Tartakovsky experimented with a “darker” tone that paid off tremendously in unexpected ways. So, when the head of Adult Swim asked, “what’s next?” he started thinking.

“Going as far back as Dexter’s Lab, we’ve always had these sequences with no dialogue. The interesting thing is those sequences got the biggest reactions,” Tartakovsky recalls. “Then, when we did the last season of Jack, we were doing those sequences, but now they were heightened because it was more adult and the story had a lot more drama. Everybody reacted to them even more. When I was developing Primal, that was the exact goal: can we tell a story like this without dialogue, completely visual, and do something not just straight action, but actually do emotions and heart and everything through these non-dialogue, visceral, visual sequences?”


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ADULT SWIM
In Samurai Jack‘s fifth season, the namesake hero would wander along a serene, wooded path with the sound of amber leaves delicately falling into a babbling stream. Then, without warning, something would rip through the silence and propel Jack into battle. It’s a clear precursor to some of the scenes in Primal, wherein the caveman will be calmly fishing for food on a rock in the middle of a rushing river before he’s forced to leap out of the way of a gator’s open jaw.

The biggest turning point for Primal, shifting away from that kids concept to what it is today, came when Tartakovsky read Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, first published in the 1930s.

“They were just pulp novels, but they’re written so well,” Tartakovsky says. “They painted a picture and you just drop in and Conan’s walking in the desert and a monster comes up and he’s got to deal with it. It’s amazing how simplistic a story [that is], but you can get so much character and emotion and adventure out of it.”

This kind of storytelling, he adds, “fits perfectly for animation.” With his new series, it’s not just a return to man’s primal nature, it’s a return to primal emotions and how to explore that without words: rage, vengeance, despair, isolation, friendship, and redemption. Through their connection, man and beast find all of that as they traverse a harsh world.

“We were thinking about the Seven Deadly Sins and can we do all of it?” Tartakovsky explains. “You always want to distill everything down to the core and see if we can build on those initial, simple things. The other big thing was, when you watch a nature show, you see an amazing-looking polar bear. He’s massive and handsome and powerful and you really care for it, and then you see a baby seal and it’s cute and amazing. You love both these characters, but one has to die for the other to live… and I love that juxtaposition and what it does to a story and how you feel about it.”

The show, too, gets to the primal core of Tartakovsky’s animation. Born in Moscow and eventually settling in Chicago, he always believed he would be an animator. Maybe he would do that for 15 years and then find a job as a director, he thought. “Everything went differently, obviously,” Tartakovsky says. Now, 49, he’s always thinking in terms of animation. “Doing simple flip books, I used to get such a kick out of it, just drawings and nothing else.”

Primal relies on his first instinct as a creator: movement. “Movement,” he adds, “is what’s entertaining. That’s the illusion of life.”

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ADULT SWIM
At first, there was a cold feet period when Tartakovsky sat down to draw the storyboards for Primal. Would he miss the dialogue? Would they even be able to pull this off? Quickly, he didn’t see this wordless world as a limitation. Knowing your limitations without dialogue made it easier, in a way. He couldn’t just have someone say they’re angry, so he had to show it. “[When] we had [the caveman] yell and grunt, especially when we added the dinosaur noises, her speech, it became a conversation in a very different way,” Tartakovsky notes. “I even started to think of it less as there’s no dialogue, there’s just no English. They speak a different language.”

Tartakovsky’s team of animators are now finished with the first five half-hour-long episodes, which will begin airing on Adult Swim in a five-night event beginning Monday, Oct. 7 at midnight ET/PT. Now, they’re working on five more.

“We have episodes where Standards [and Practices] is raising the red flag and saying, ‘Maybe this is too much,'” the showrunner says of the first run. “Some of those episodes might get TV-Mature. For me, the stuff they show on Adult Swim is pretty crazy and we never curved ourselves.”

Even the violence itself harkens back to the title and the concept. “I’m not a violent person at all,” he adds, “and I don’t want to show violence for violent’s sake. The violence is a sexy thing to sell, but there’s so much more to the show than just violence just because we can do it. When we went into a sequence we always wanted to make sure we were doing it for a reason. That way we become honest with it.”
Click to expand...
 
Honestly. I hope he gets his due one day.
 
The closest he came was storyboarding the final fight in IM2.
 
Adult Swim's Primal Tells a Prehistoric Story of Survival - IGN First - IGN

All September long, IGN is highlighting the best TV coming your way in the 2019-2020 season. Today we're looking at Primal, the latest animated project from Samurai Jack and Dexter's Laboratory creator Genndy Tartakovsky. Primal is a major departure from Tartakovsky's previous work in more ways than one. It's a prehistoric fantasy series where a caveman and a dinosaur band together to survive. It's also completely dialogue-free. We were able to chat with Tartakovsky recently to learn more about Primal's unique brand of visceral storytelling. As different as Primal is in terms of plot, tone and subject matter, it's also a series that should be instantly recognizable to fans of Tartakovsy's previous Cartoon Network projects. His distinctive character designs and haunting environments couldn't be mistaken for the work of any other animator.


To start, check out an exclusive new image from the series below:



Tartakovsky told us his approach to animating Primal doesn't differ wildly from that of Dexter's Laboratory or Samurai Jack. The main difference, he explained, is that the animation itself is done digitally through TV Paint rather than on actual paper, which helps speed up the overall process.

"At the end of the day it’s still completely traditional animation," Tartakovsky said. "As far as my approach, it’s always pretty much has been the same; I’ve just been trying to improve with each episode, project, etc. I’ve spent the last 25 years or so trying to find my point of view and refining it and with Primal it feels like it has come together in the strongest way possible."

We were curious how much the switch to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim brand has changed Tartakovsky's process; is there a greater freedom that comes with the Adult Swim name, beyond superficial elements like violence? Tartakovsky told us storytelling freedom has never really been an issue at Cartoon Network, even in the days of Dexter's Lab.

"I have been very fortunate for the most part of my career when it comes to support and trust," he said. "The very first episode of Dexter's Lab was greenlit and overseen by Mike Lazzo who was back then the head of programming at Cartoon Network in its very beginnings and now he is my boss for Primal. It makes things very easy when the people you are working for have trust and believe in you and actually really like and respect your work. Of course, during my Cartoon Network years we were making shows for kids so there is a built-in system of things you can do and not do, but we definitely pushed stories and the way we told them, even the early days of Dexter."

Tartakovsky continued, "The more stories you tell the better you begin to understand what you’re doing, and at the same time, story is something that I don’t think you can ever master or reduce to a formula. It’s something that I learned that comes from the gut. The more you do, the more confidence you get but it’s very complex and sometimes very elusive. So when doing something adult we are free to do something more complex and sophisticated."
Primal: Season 1 Gallery

Silence is one of the real hallmarks of Samurai Jack. It's the rare animated series to place a real value on silent scenes, allowing imagery to tell a story in place of words. Tartakovsky told us that while he didn't necessarily enter into Primal with the intention of challenging himself to tell a completely dialogue-free story, that approach was just "natural."

"After the success of the last season of Samurai Jack I noticed people really responded to the silent sequences. We’ve always done them and they always stand out," Tartakovsky said. "When developing this show it was natural to not have dialogue as a caveman and dinosaur don’t naturally speak, and with the added success of Jack it came to me that could we actually make a show made of just those sequences."

When asked about his particular cinematic influences, Tartakovsky said, "My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some 70’s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement. In some ways I don’t think of it as being dialogue-free, but we are trying to tell these stories in the most visceral way we can, and because our main characters can’t technically speak English we have to find new ways to emote."

Primal may not feature any traditional dialogue, but it does star two characters with names and clear needs and desires. The relationship they form is very much at the heart of the series. "We call the caveman SPEAR and the T-Rex FANG," Tartakovsky said. "Their bond is really a man and animal relationship in this brutal primordial world. It’s their relationship that really is the key to the show's success I think. Early in my career I realized that accessible character relationships [are] the true sign of a successful show and so for Primal I wanted to explore the relationship between man and beast on the most primal level. Even our human is almost a beast himself. A similar horrific tragedy binds these two unlikely characters and they have to learn to rely on each other to survive.

Check out the video below for a look at how Samurai Jack handled action and emotion. Tartakovsky acknowledged that Primal doesn't exactly follow documented history, as the last dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years before early man came along. He said, "Even though we try to keep some of the creatures historically accurate, this really isn’t a realistic prehistoric land, but rather a fantastically brutal and horrific prehistoric land. The main focus was to have it feel pulpy. The fun of historic beasts fighting beasts from our imagination was the goal, and when you keep some things historically accurate, it gives more substance to the made-up things."

Finally, Tartakovsky revealed that his plans for Primal have grown significantly with time. Initially, he conceived it as a short film before deciding the main characters and their relationship were better suited for a longer series. Initially, Adult Swim will be debuting Primal as a five-part miniseries airing over the course of a single week, but it sounds as though we can look forward to even more stories in this prehistoric world.

"We actually have ten stories that we are currently working on and the world is getting bigger with each one," teased Tartakovsky. "The show is extremely difficult and we didn’t want to rush through it, so it’s taking us much longer than a normal TV production that we’ve done in the past. I’ve done over 25 years of television and to me this isn’t television, it’s something so much more than what those words are connected to, especially in animation. It is a big world and our characters are just discovering it for themselves - where it is heading is freaking nuts! We are trying in some ways to push convention with this subject matter and give the audience something they haven’t seen before."

Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal debuts on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block on Monday, October 7 at 12am EST/PST, with new episodes following every night that week through October 11.
Click to expand...
 
Cool, imma check that.
 
Just finished watching the first episode.

Amazing, simply amazing. Genndy Tartakovsky has proven that he could tell compelling stories with mininal dialogue in Samurai Jack, and here with no dialogue, he still delivers. The animation is fantastic, the sound design one of the best I've heard in any animated show I've seen so far, and how the two main characters come together is masterfully and tragically done.

I really can't wait for the next episode.
 
Wow at that first episode. I'm glad I checked this out, because I didn't even know this existed until like a couple of weeks ago. Anyways, my god is the animation in this show gorgeous. Every frame down to the smallest detail is so beautifully animated. It's gory as hell too which I also love.
 
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